The 15th Annual Southern Writers/Southern Writing Conference is aUniversity of Mississippi Graduate Student event held in conjunction withthe universityâ€™s Annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference.Participants are encouraged to remain in Oxford after the SWSW Conferenceto attend the Faulkner Conference. More information about the 2009Faulkner Conference will be available atwww.outreach.olemiss.edu/events/faulkner/.

The Graduate Students in the Department of English invite you to submitabstracts exploring Southern literature and writers. Accepted submissionswill be presented in Oxford, Mississippi, July 16-18, 2009. The keynotespeaker will be Dr. Scott Romine, associate professor of English at theUniversity of North Carolina, Greensboro, and author of The NarrativeForms of Southern Community (LSU Press, 1999) and the recently publishedThe Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction(LSU Press, 2008).

Topics for papers or panels are not restricted to literature, however. Weurge submissions on:

Defining â€œThe Southâ€The U.S. South in Global contextsTopics in race, gender, class, and identitySouthern space and placeEcocriticism, travel narratives, nature writing, and the SouthernlandscapeReligion, gothic, and the grotesqueFolklore, material culture, and communityLetters, diaries, and periodicalsOral culture, music, and food representation in Southern culture andliterature

Although our conference regularly features panels on traditional Southernauthors such as William Faulkner, Flannery Oâ€™Connor, Eudora Welty, andZora Neale Hurston, we would also like to promote panels this year oncontemporary authors such as Larry Brown, Lewis Nordan, Lee Smith, FannieFlagg, ZZ Packer, and Edward P. Jones.

We also invite creative writers to submit poetry, short stories, or novelexcerpts that deal with Southern themes or settings. These creativeentries will be featured in a Friday night reading and reception at Off-Square Books in downtown Oxford.

The conference reading limit for each paper presentation is 15 minutes.

Please send 200â€"300 word abstracts of critical work or entire creativeworks to: swswgradconference_at_gmail.com. Panel proposals which includethree or four participants are also accepted. Please send yoursubmissions as Word attachments and include your university affiliation,summer address, and e-mail address. The deadline for submissions is5:00pm on Monday, March 2, 2009.